The image, reminiscent of a revolutionary Che Guevara, is of 34-year-old Dmitry Sytii, the current frontman of the Wagner paramilitary group in Africa.

Since his boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in an apparent assassination last month, Sytii has been thrust to the center of an emerging battle over the fate of Wagner’s sprawling multibillion-dollar African empire of mercenaries, gold, lumber and diamonds. With his intimate knowledge of Wagner’s front companies and smuggling networks, the polyglot, Western-educated Sytii is likely to play a pivotal role. 

The war-torn Central African Republic has been the nerve center of Wagner’s activities in Africa and the hub of its business operations. Sytii is so close to the nation’s politicians that he lives and works in a luxurious villa in the capital, Bangui, that once was the president’s official residence. It is surrounded by an army camp occupied by Wagner fighters. 

Sytii navigates the city’s teeming streets in a silver Toyota SUV with no license plates, visiting upscale restaurants and senior government officials. He travels regularly to neighboring countries such as Cameroon and Chad.

It is unclear, though, whether Wagner’s African kingdom will stay intact and how long Sytii will retain his power. Russian government officials have told Wagner’s African allies—a collection of strongmen, junta leaders and warlords—that they will be taking tighter control. Other mercenary companies managed by oligarchs with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin are jostling for the spoils, with their representatives joining the Russian defense ministry’s recent tour of Wagner’s African fiefs.

Sytii lacks Prigozhin’s connections to the Kremlin, which had opened doors for Wagner with African leaders. His ties to the deceased Wagner owner also raise questions for the group’s eventual new bosses over his allegiances.

This account of Sytii’s role in Wagner’s African operations is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with them, including Wagner operatives and business partners, politicians in countries where the group has a presence, and current and former international security officials.

Sytii didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did Prigozhin’s holding company Concord, a catering firm that expanded into real estate, media and mining and holds assets in Russia and abroad. A spokesman for the Kremlin said that he couldn’t comment on the activities of private companies in Africa, and that the Russian government has cooperation programs with many countries on the continent. The spokesman previously said Putin had nothing to do with Prigozhin’s death. 

Sytii has managed Wagner’s corporate and propaganda ventures in Africa for the past half decade. His shaggy hair and slight build stand out among Wagner’s burly, often-tattooed fighters. He attended business school in Paris, and has said he is fluent in Russian, English, Spanish and French. 

People familiar with Wagner’s business operations said he oversees a network of front companies that the group has used to export gold, diamonds, lumber and other raw materials from his base in the Central African Republic. Sytii also directs Wagner-funded media outlets and social-media campaigns that share anti-Western propaganda designed to prop up Moscow-friendly leaders, these people said.

U.S. and European authorities have blacklisted him for his work with Wagner in Africa, making it illegal to do business with him and freezing any assets he might have in those jurisdictions.

Wagner’s business operations have helped subsidize some 5,000 mercenaries across at least four African nations, whom the U.S. government and international human-rights organizations have accused of raping, kidnapping and killing civilians. Wagner’s fighters have enabled the Kremlin to provide military support to Russia’s allies without stretching its regular armed forces. In turn, the arrangement bolstered Prigozhin’s personal wealth by giving him access to minerals and other resources.

In the weeks after Prigozhin’s death, Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra communicated to Moscow that he wants Sytii and other longtime Wagner operatives to stay in the country, arguing that removing them would disrupt his government’s efforts to fight rebel groups, according to former and current European security officials. A spokesman for Touadéra didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The Sytii T-shirts were first distributed in Bangui late last year by a Russian cultural center Sytii runs in that city, after Sytii was injured by a bomb mailed to him there, according to people familiar with Wagner’s operations. Recently, Wagner-friendly journalists and pro-government youth in Bangui have been wearing them. 

In an interview earlier this month with the Russian newspaper Pravda, Sytii said he continues to work for Russia. Asked by a correspondent visiting Bangui about Prigozhin’s demise, he replied: “We need to keep working and not lose heart.” 

Sytii explained, in a video posted on the Pravda website, why he returned to the country after the mail bomb blew off three of his fingers and injured his chest. He warned that pulling experienced agents like him from the continent could endanger the Moscow-friendly networks he helped create on behalf of Russia. 

“If we start to retreat, then everything that has been built will also crumble,” he said, a black leather glove hiding his mangled right hand. 

The Central African Republic is a landlocked former French colony of about five million people that, despite its natural resources, remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Wagner operatives arrived in the country in 2017 at the invitation of President Touadéra, a mathematician turned strongman whose government was under siege by rebel groups. 

Among the first to land was Sytii, who left behind a son and ex-wife in France. Sytii had studied international trade in St. Petersburg before earning a master’s degree in marketing and business in Paris. “Extremely interested in working in an international company in high-tech domain that will challenge my skills and competences with exciting tasks,” he wrote in a résumé he posted online after graduating in 2015.

According to the U.S. Treasury, he was hired by Prigozin’s Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based “troll farm.” The 2019 report by special counsel Robert Mueller said the Internet Research Agency used fake social-media accounts to spread propaganda and attempt to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. While the Russian government has denied that it interfered in the vote, Prigozhin appeared to admit to such efforts last year.

Sytii’s first job in the Central African Republic was serving as an interpreter for prospectors looking for mining opportunities on behalf of one of Prigozhin’s companies, the now-sanctioned M Invest, and a band of Wagner mercenaries presented as unarmed Russian military instructors. Within months, Sytii registered Wagner’s first company in the country, Lobaye Invest, which got permission to begin mining for gold and diamonds.

According to the European Union, Lobaye financed a new radio station that today broadcasts pro-Russian and anti-Western propaganda, and markets Wagner-brewed vodka and beer to Central Africans. Lobaye has since been sanctioned by the U.S. and the EU.

A list of contacts from Sytii’s cellphone in 2018 obtained by All Eyes on Wagner, a nonprofit that monitors the mercenary group, suggests the extent of his involvement with Wagner’s corporate ventures. Among his contacts were a container-shipping agent and a South African company that sells diamond-mining equipment. 

In 2019, a man identified in those phone contacts as his driver set up Diamville, a diamond and gold trading outfit that the U.S. this year sanctioned as a Wagner front company. That same day, one of the driver’s 

 friends registered a business that in 2021 was granted a large local logging concession, according to documents first published by All Eyes on Wagner and later reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. 

Among the local politicians that Sytii befriended was Hassan Bouba, a rebel leader turned government minister whose fighters have run combat missions alongside Wagner mercenaries in the Central African Republic, and Touadéra’s security adviser, Fidèle Gouandjika. 

In an interview with the Journal, Gouandjika called Sytii one of his “very good friends” and said they bonded at dinners at the Central African official’s home over bottles of Stolichnaya vodka and local delicacies such as sautéed caterpillar, cow tripe in cassava leaf, plantain and Nile perch. Bouba didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As Wagner’s operations in the Central African Republic grew, it offered services to other African governments that were under domestic pressure and felt abandoned by the West, often because of sanctions or concerns over human rights.

In 2018, Wagner started working with Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who at the time was part of the military leadership of Sudan, a country that was under U.S. sanctions for its alleged links to international terrorist groups. Now, Dagalo and his paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces are fighting a civil war with Sudan’s government. According to the U.S. and European governments, Dagalo also works with Wagner to exploit Sudan’s gold reserves.

In 2019, Wagner fighters briefly deployed in Mozambique to help fight Islamist rebels, and two years later the group signed a deal with the military junta in Mali to combat jihadist insurgents. 

Each country that Wagner entered was pulled deeper into Russia’s sphere of influence. Sytii helped run the nonmilitary side of that operation.

Social-media campaigns praising Russia and attacking the West began popping up in African nations, especially former French colonies. U.S. companies such as X Corp., formerly known as Twitter, and Meta’s Facebook have traced them to Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency. 

French officials have said Wagner-led disinformation has encouraged military coups and the subsequent expulsion of Western troops from several countries, including in Mali and Burkina Faso. 

Wagner was rewarded by its allies with access to natural resources. In 2020, a Wagner-linked company, Midas Resources, gained control of the Ndassima mine in the Central African Republic, whose previous owner estimated that it might contain as much as $2.7 billion in gold. 

A year later, Sytii was promoted to director of the Russian House in Bangui, an institution meant to promote Russian cultural values in the Central African nation. This year, Wagner began brewing its own beer, Africa Ti L’Or, or Africa Is Gold, in the Sango language. A competing brewery was torched in an arson attack that Western intelligence agencies have attributed to Wagner.

When the group’s beer went on sale this spring, Sytii was back in Russia, recovering from the wounds he sustained from the mail bomb sent to him at the Russian House. Prigozhin claimed France was behind the bomb—an accusation the French government has denied. In interviews with Russian media, Sytii said the attack followed threats made against him, his son and ex-wife in France with the aim of forcing Wagner to withdraw from the Central African Republic. 

Around the time Sytii returned to Bangui, Wagner’s relationship with the Russian government was beginning to fray. In June, after Prigozhin had accused Russia’s military leadership of deliberately throttling the supply of weapons and ammunition to Wagner’s troops in Ukraine, his men marched toward Moscow. The aborted rebellion ended with a deal between Prigozhin and Putin, banishing Wagner’s fighters from the Ukrainian battlefields. 

Sytii publicly aligned himself with Prigozhin, releasing a video in which he pledged to keep working for Wagner despite a new round of Western sanctions. “We will continue to work, and we will continue to realize all our projects under the leadership of Yevgeny Prigozhin,” he said in French. “With him, we will have results.” 

At that point, Prigozhin’s businesses in Russia were under attack. He was forced to shut down some of his prime assets, including his media and disinformation companies, and he lost lucrative catering contracts. 

In the Central African Republic, Wagner registered new front companies after existing ones had been sanctioned, according to people familiar with its operations. 

The group was intent on stopping details about its work in the country from leaking. Truck drivers transporting Wagner goods said they had to relinquish cellphones when making trips to and from the Ndassima gold mine. Those trucking lumber to the Cameroonian port of Douala said Wagner fighters rode in their cabins to monitor them. Freight-related documents had to be handed over immediately upon arrival at the port, said drivers interviewed by the Journal.

Weeks later, Sytii accompanied Prigozhin on parts of what would be a final tour of his African empire. They attended an event at the Russian House in Bangui, where some of the last known photos of the Wagner founder were taken. Prigozhin died in a plane crash on Aug. 23, a few days after his final meeting with Sytii.

Gouandjika, the security adviser to the Central African Republic’s president and Sytii’s friend, responded by posting on Facebook a photo of himself in a T-shirt that said, “Je suis Wagner,” French for ”I am Wagner.” Bouba, the former rebel turned government minister, flew to St. Petersburg to visit a makeshift memorial to Prigozhin.

In the weeks since Prigozhin’s death, Sytii has worked to preserve Prigozhin’s legacy in the continent, according to a Wagner business partner and a European security official. He has traveled to Douala in Cameroon, Wagner’s main exit route for goods from Central Africa. That city also is the base of Afrique Média, a pro-Russian television channel that the U.S. government has said is tied to Prigozhin. 

Satellite images show that the N’dassima gold mine in the Central African Republic continues to operate.

The Pravda correspondent asked Sytii about Wagner’s future in Africa. “I don’t have answers to these questions,” Sytii said. “I am coming from the assumption that everything remains the same and we are continuing to work.”